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Stars Outside the Milky Way Turns Out To Be More Massive Than Previously Thought

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The Andromeda Galaxy, our Milky Way’s closest neighbor, is the farthest object in the sky that you can see with the naked eye.

Nationalgeographic.co.id – A research team from the University of Copenhagen has arrived at the main results regarding the population bintang outside the Milky Way. The results could change our understanding of a variety of astronomical phenomena, including the formation of black holes, supernovaand why dead galaxy.

For as long as humans have studied the sky, how stars look in distant galaxies has been a mystery. However, in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal on May 25, 2022, with the title “Implications of a Temperature-dependent Initial Mass Function. I. Photometric Template Fitting”, the research team at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen dispelled previous understandings of stars outside our own galaxy.

Since 1955, it has been assumed that the composition of stars in other galaxies in the universe is similar to that of the hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy, which is a mixture of massive, medium-mass, and low-mass stars.

But with the help of observations of 140,000 galaxies across the universe and other sophisticated models, the team has tested whether the same distribution of stars seen in the Milky Way holds true elsewhere. The answer is no. Stars in distant galaxies are usually more massive than stars in our “local environment”. This finding has a major impact on what we think we know about the universe.

“The mass of a star tells us, astronomers, a lot of things. If you change the mass, you also change the number of supernovae and black holes that emerge from massive stars. Thus, our results mean that we have to revise a lot of things that we previously thought, because distant galaxies look very different from our own,” said Albert Sneppen, a graduate student at the Niels Bohr Institute and first author of the study. Tech Explorist.

Researchers assume that the size and weight of stars in other galaxies are similar to those in ours for more than fifty years, for the simple reason that they cannot observe them through telescopes, as is the case with stars in our own galaxy.

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Only light from the most powerful stars can reach Earth.

Haktarphone/Wikimedia Commons

Only light from the most powerful stars can reach Earth.


The distant galaxies are billions of light years away. As a result, only the light from their most powerful star can reach Earth. This has puzzled researchers around the world for years, because they have never been able to accurately explain how stars in other galaxies are distributed, an uncertainty that forces them to believe they are distributed like the stars in our Milky Way.

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